I first noticed that technology tends to come full circle the first time I saw a CD. It was hard to miss the cyclical progression from my parents' reel-to-reel magnetic tape recorder to LPs with fairy tales about Br'er Rabbit back to (comparatively) miniature tape cassettes with '90s Soviet pop and Madonna and, finally, to a shiny disk which was just like an LP (except completely different).

The last time I mused about technology coming full circle was when I recently noticed the surging popularity of org-mode, which is essentially an add-on to a 30-year old text editing platform.

There are several reasons that Emacs/org-mode combination has such a wide appeal. Key among them is the fact that it provides a unified environment for notes, record-keeping, project-planning. The underlying format (plain text) guarantees ultimate portability, native presentation layer (in Emacs) is very simple yet very powerful, and HTML/LaTeX export functionality allows to share one's work easily.

Case in point: this post is being written in Emacs using the org2blog interface to WordPress. As of late, the amount of text in my *.org files and the amount of text on my blog have been, to put it mildly, incommensurate. Hopefully org/wordpress integration will help restore the balance to a more sensible level.